Top 50 Blogs for Fashion Sewers

Backstage Report

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The Kent State University fashion students worked feverishly through 20 long hours to create a garment to be judged in a fashion show. There were many great entries and prizes, one person even won a scholarship from Coats & Clark!

Theresa Rietschlin, the winner of our prize (pictured above) will help us create a new pattern for the site. Congratulations to all that entered, we are excited to see the pattern that comes from this.

We recently added number 180 to our favorites. Why? Because Jeff Jarvis, internet and media expert, mentioned BurdaStyle in his new book “What Would Google Do?” on page 180!

And this is what he writes:

…Another challenge: fashion… Just as the internet democratizes news and entertainment, it is opening up style…See also BurdaStyle.com’s open-source sewing from the German publishing empire Burda, which decided to take copyrights off its dress patterns and invite the public to use them, adapt them, create their own, and share them. The site is filled with patterns, how-tos, and discussion…

If you’re interested to learn more, we highly recommend reading Jeff’s book and his blog Buzzmachine.

We will be delving deeper into the ins and out of Tailoring, Outerwear, and Menswear. This month we will revisit some of our past patterns and look at the variations you have all made of them. Along with these old patterns, we will have new patterns like new coats for men and women.

This weekend twenty-six fashion design students at <a href"http://www.kent.edu/index.cfm&quot;&gt;Kent State University will be competing in a “Project Runway”-type design challenge. They will have only two days to complete a garment and have it ready to be judged in a fashion show.

There are some awesome prizes being awarded to the winners, one lucky contestant will have their design turned into a pattern for BurdaStyle and one will even win a scholarship from Coats & Clark! Keep your eyes peeled, we will be putting up a slide show of the winning designs.

We were so happy that you all loved last week’s Paola pattern! We would love to hear your input on this pattern, can you put your finger on what you liked about this dress? Let us know and we will try and keep it in mind for future patterns!

Now is the time to speak up! We have been collecting your suggestions from the forums on how they should function. We are in the midst of planning the forum on the new site and we would love your input. Please leave comments below on what you like, how to improve what you don’t like, and what functions you would like to see.

Our last post has created quite a stir in the community so let us explain a bit more what BurdaStyle is, what it offers, and what the changes entail:

BURDASTYLE

BurdaStyle set out to be a community for people that love to sew or would like to learn.

We believe that supplying access for everyone to a platform where we all share our inspirations, creations and knowledge is the best way to improve your skills, get help when you’re stuck and earn reward and recognition for your hard work.

We want this community to be open to anyone and to continue to offer easy and cost-free access to all areas of the site that involve inspiration, recognition and especially exchange of knowledge.

PATTERNCHARGE

We do want to apologize if you may have felt upset by our recent changes.

We at BurdaStyle have always acted with our community in mind, which was also the case while making the decision to charge for all patterns, and feel that this is the point to give you insight into the larger picture:

Clearly our reason behind charging for ALL patterns is to create revenue, in order to produce new patterns, new content and new features and to keep the current site intact. Only charging for new patterns is not able to cover the cost for maintaining the entire content on the site.
BurdaStyle would love to offer you all patterns always for free. And clearly you, our community, feels very strong about our patterns and the resource of free patterns.

So why not join forces and work together.

Our plan has been all along to find partners that are interested in working together with us on a variety of activities such as contests, how tos, features and sponsored pattern downloads at times. If a partner chooses to sponsor a pattern we would be able to cover the cost and waive the fee for a certain amount of downloads.

We are in the talk with a fair amount of companies that showed interest in working with us.

Seeing your immense response we were thinking, what about joining forces with our most important asset, our community. What about YOU helping us find partners that are interested in engaging in activities for example sponsoring free downloads for the community

Anyone successfully creating a partnership would be rewarded with the thankful response from the community and a percentage of the partnership fee.

FEATUREDMEMBERPROJECTS

Being floored by your talent and efforts creating patterns and creations we felt that you need to be included in our weekly project upload on the homepage.
From now on we will accept submissions of creations with instructions and/or patterns from which the best ones will be included in our editorial calendar and featured for one week on the most prominent spot of our homepage. Additionally these projects will have a mention in our newsletter.
Send submissions to team@BurdaStyle.com with the subject line: “Featured Project”.

MEMBER’S PATTERNSSALE

Starting with the new site members will be able to sell their own patterns.

We hope that you are looking forward to new challenges and opportunities with us.
We are looking forward to the year 2009 and many years to follow with our community!

Happy New Year! We hope all of you had a beautiful holiday season. We at BurdaStyle are excited for another great year and want to let you all know what we have planned for 2009.

In just a couple of weeks, BurdaStyle turns two years old! In that time, BurdaStyle has done a lot of growing: we are over 150,000 members strong, and we have over 160 open-source, copyright-free patterns in our database. Not to mention the rest of knowledge and inspiration available on BurdaStyle in the form of how tos, forums, and creations. Now, with our robust and wonderful community and a deep database in place, BurdaStyle enters a new phase, which includes becoming a self-sustainable business and launching a new and improved website.

As part of our plan to grow BurdaStyle and to better serve our members we will need to start charging for some of our patterns. BurdaStyle patterns developed from contest winners will still be free, as will some popular basics and smaller projects. Patterns uploaded by members will still be free, as will all the other areas of our website. Of course, everything will still be open-source, which means copyright-free, and therefore available for alteration and replication, and open for you to base a business on.

Currently, we are working on a major site redesign, which will launch late Spring. The new site offers much increased functionality, including a step-by-step project interface, which will allow you to see who is working on what, and what problems and hints other members have. The new site will also offer members the opportunity to sell their own patterns.

Thank you, in advance, for all of your continued support and understanding. We are committed to bringing you the best and only open-source sewing website around, and we want BurdaStyle to keep getting stronger and better. We look forward to an exciting New Year, with all it’s challenges and victories!

After the whir of the holidays and finally getting all the presents made I have turned my eyes to the future, and by the future, I mean the New Year. It’s a great time to start a new, turn over a new leaf and stick to your resolutions, as hard as that may be.

After a year of working here at BurdaStyle, I have decided to actually make more of what I wear. Though there have been missteps (my first 100,000 member T shirt is still kicking around the office) I have learned from them, and am making the pledge to make more and buy less for 2009.

We Are Now An Official Affiliate of Mood Fabrics

BurdaStyle is a DIY fashion and sewing community. Our aim is to bring the craft of sewing to a new generation of fashion designers, hobbyists, DIY'ers, and inspire fashion enthusiasts. We offer downloadable PDF sewing patterns, project ideas, tutorials and a community passionate about fashion. Press coverage on BurdaStyle can be found here.